Patient medical parameter data is acquired, collated, stored and displayed for use in providing patient clinical care in hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare delivery settings. Patient medical parameter data may include vital signs ventilator information, infusion pump data associated with fluid delivery and other data. Such patient medical parameter data is typically displayed on a patient monitoring device screen in a trend indicative chart with a time axis. This type of chart is commonly termed a Flowsheet. A patient monitoring device is usually located at a patient bedside or nursing station in a hospital ward or in an intensive care, surgical or other location and may be connected to a network such as the Internet, a LAN, a WAN or an intra-net for acquiring patient parameter data from local sources (e.g., patient attached sensors) or remote sources (e.g., a remotely stored electronic patient record). The Flowsheet is an electronic chronological chart of patient parameter information that substitutes for a paper vital sign Flowsheet.
It is desirable that an electronic Flowsheet offer similar or better features and flexibility than a paper Flowsheet chart that it replaces. Therefore an electronic Flowsheet needs to enable healthcare personnel to acquire and record patient Fluid Intake and Output related parameters including infusion pump data associated with fluid delivery and other information. Known systems typically acquire, collate and store Fluid related patient medical parameter data for display in a Flowsheet within corresponding parameter acquisition time intervals together with a time axis. For this purpose, known systems acquire and store large quantities of patient medical parameter data over relatively long time periods (e.g., for the duration of a patient hospital stay) for display in relatively short Flowsheet acquisition time intervals (e.g., 3 minutes to a few hours). Typically at least one patient parameter value is acquired for each acquisition time interval. This results in the acquistion of extensive data sets containing redundant data requiring the allocation of correspondingly large amounts of memory. In addition, acquired fluid intake or output data values are used in computation and display of cumulative patient fluid intake or output values. Consequently, if a previously recorded fluid intake or output data value used in such a computation is changed, a series of subsequent computed fluid cumulative values need to be re-computed and updated for Flowsheet display. Such a change in a prior fluid intake or output data value occurs in response to a user, such as a nurse, administering a fluid medication and manually entering a corresponding fluid intake or output value overriding an existing value, for example. The difficulty involved in re-computing fluid cumulative intake or output values over a time period (or updating cumulative values within individual parameter acquistion time intervals) is compounded by the large quantity of data involved. A system according to invention principles addresses these problems and derivative problems.